Anyhow just a crazy idea. I know gutting a dead beeb and attaching USB controller to the keyboard would likely be cheaper & easier... but it would be nice to recreate / document the original keyboard. I would buy one at least...

Last edited by 8bitkick on Thu Jan 04, 2018 8:13 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I'd definitely be interested to know who Lazarur used to manufacture... if we can get the exact keycap design in SVG (scanning original keys if necessary) and the right ABS colors... and a few people interested... it could be cost effective for everyone... pimpmykeyboard looks promising

I am sure that it would be possible with enough time and effort to generate an SVG that properly matches the font. However, they don't offer custom colours - only the limited list on their website. (Having said that, the colours I chose were a fairly good match.)

There is so much wonder in the universe; why should you want to imagine that there is more?

lazarusr wrote:I got them from here: http://www.wasdkeyboards.com. They were ****** expensive and they don't appear to do a discount for quantity.

I am sure that it would be possible with enough time and effort to generate an SVG that properly matches the font.

Love the owl keys!!!

Is this for a homebrew computer project?

I was hoping someone might have the SVG / know the font (yours looks very close...)... otherwise it's a case of scanning each original key, and passing into Adobe Illustrator to convert to SVG and clean up, which will be laborious, but not impossible...

Pimpmykeyboard / massdrop might be a way to get some economy of scale if anyone else if interested in some keycaps. But isn't going to be cheap...

I have a pile of Cherry MX keyswitches here for my custom Master keyboard project, which is still just a dream... very interested in getting my hands on an SVG for Beeb keycard if lazarusr wants to share!

Happy to share. However, there are problems with the SVG some of which are more obvious than others (and it is the less obvious ones that cause the biggest headache). The supplier also required the SVG filed to be flattened before submitting it such that I can't edit it to correct the problems.

lazarusr wrote:Happy to share. However, there are problems with the SVG some of which are more obvious than others (and it is the less obvious ones that cause the biggest headache). The supplier also required the SVG filed to be flattened before submitting it such that I can't edit it to correct the problems.

Also bear in mind that I have seen reports that the labelling on the keycaps is not particularly hardwearing.

Excellent thanks Lazrus! Would you object to us sticking the SVG on GitHub (or similar) and working on smoothing out the wrinkles, creating a community keyset?

myelin wrote:I have a pile of Cherry MX keyswitches here for my custom Master keyboard project, which is still just a dream... very interested in getting my hands on an SVG for Beeb keycard if lazarusr wants to share!

Myelin... once we have some nice SVGs, maybe we we could get a group order in,

Setting up a single print run for keys is very expensive. With a few backers the price could come down considerably...

EDIT: Best way might be a kickstarter just to cover manufacturing costs, with materials released under Creative Commons... I did this once before with some success

8bitkick wrote:Excellent thanks Lazrus! Would you object to us sticking the SVG on GitHub (or similar) and working on smoothing out the wrinkles, creating a community keyset?

If this can go up on GitHub under one of the standard open source licenses (Apache, GPL, MIT, BSD), that would be amazing -- my employer's open source policy makes it easy for me to contribute to anything like that and hard to contribute to anything else, and I would very much like to be able to contribute here!

8bitkick wrote:Excellent thanks Lazrus! Would you object to us sticking the SVG on GitHub (or similar) and working on smoothing out the wrinkles, creating a community keyset?

If this can go up on GitHub under one of the standard open source licenses (Apache, GPL, MIT, BSD), that would be amazing -- my employer's open source policy makes it easy for me to contribute to anything like that and hard to contribute to anything else, and I would very much like to be able to contribute here!

Definitely! I've started a (currently empty...) repository for the purpose. If we get somewhere we could request it moved to stardot's own.

The BBC Micro keyboard was double-shot so the chances are the 'font' is actually one provided by an engraving machine such as the http://gorton-machine.org/forms/form_1309/index.html … - many of these engraving fonts including those by Gorton have not made it to OTF/TTF

This very same question - ie. what font was used on the BBC micro keytops - occurred to me only a few days ago when I was making up the picture set of my visit to CCH in September. Looking at the collection they have there, multiple 1980s machines used exactly the same font.

8bitkick wrote:Myelin... once we have some nice SVGs, maybe we we could get a group order in,

Setting up a single print run for keys is very expensive. With a few backers the price could come down considerably...

I'm interested in this (as long as the keycaps are Cherry MX compatible). Looking at my notes from a few months ago, my plan was to use maxkeyboard.com's $40 full custom keycap service. Even though the layout doesn't match the BBC/Master keyboard exactly, I believe I could shoehorn everything in, using spare numpad keys and so on to do BREAK, DEL etc. I think the only key I was going to have to order separately was the 8-unit spacebar.

If we do a full custom order, perhaps we could make a keycap set that would work for either Model B or Master style keyboards. I'll see about measuring up what I have here so I can make up a PCB.

8bitkick wrote:Myelin... once we have some nice SVGs, maybe we we could get a group order in,

Setting up a single print run for keys is very expensive. With a few backers the price could come down considerably...

I'm interested in this (as long as the keycaps are Cherry MX compatible). Looking at my notes from a few months ago, my plan was to use maxkeyboard.com's $40 full custom keycap service. Even though the layout doesn't match the BBC/Master keyboard exactly, I believe I could shoehorn everything in, using spare numpad keys and so on to do BREAK, DEL etc. I think the only key I was going to have to order separately was the 8-unit spacebar.

If we do a full custom order, perhaps we could make a keycap set that would work for either Model B or Master style keyboards. I'll see about measuring up what I have here so I can make up a PCB.

I am still learning on this topic, but think Maxkeyboard and wasd offer UV printed custom keys. These are cheaper for short runs but may not last well (?)

I was hoping to do a higher quality double-shot run... the same process as the original keys...this would be more expensive so only possible with multiple backers... I’ve been investigating the costs and am waiting for some replies...

In any case, we can get the design files together and see who else interested... I’m reunited with my beeb in a couple of weeks and can scan some keys then...

BeebMaster wrote:This very same question - ie. what font was used on the BBC micro keytops - occurred to me only a few days ago when I was making up the picture set of my visit to CCH in September. Looking at the collection they have there, multiple 1980s machines used exactly the same font.

They still have the tooling to recreate the double shot (injection molding in two stages) BBC Micro key caps in the same typeface they have always used, called Gorton Modified. They are pricing it up now. I expect it will be expensive and probably only worth doing with a Kickstarter / group buy...

8bitkick wrote:They still have the tooling to recreate the double shot (injection molding in two stages) BBC Micro key caps in the same typeface they have always used, called Gorton Modified. They are pricing it up now. I expect it will be expensive and probably only worth doing with a Kickstarter / group buy...

8bitkick wrote:They still have the tooling to recreate the double shot (injection molding in two stages) BBC Micro key caps in the same typeface they have always used, called Gorton Modified. They are pricing it up now. I expect it will be expensive and probably only worth doing with a Kickstarter / group buy...

Ooh!

Would those key caps fit modern keyswitches? If so, that becomes rather interesting.

8bitkick wrote:They still have the tooling to recreate the double shot (injection molding in two stages) BBC Micro key caps in the same typeface they have always used, called Gorton Modified. They are pricing it up now. I expect it will be expensive and probably only worth doing with a Kickstarter / group buy...

Ooh!

Would those key caps fit modern keyswitches? If so, that becomes rather interesting.

If we are going to have them made to fit Cherry MX key-switches then part of the tooling will have to be changed to deal with that. If they just remake the old Beeb keycaps then that is going to have very limited appeal. Indeed, there were a number of different key-switches used on Beebs, so they would only fit the switches they were tooled for.

What are we actually going to have printed on the key caps? If we do an identical run of the key switches that exactly matches what was on the Beeb, then that would imply making some specialised Beeb keyboard - that in turn would mean spinning a PCB for the keyboard - easily do-able, but it will then get very expensive. If we want to have a set of keycaps that can replace those on a conventional IBM keyboard, then we will have to arrange for tooling to cover the keys that weren't on the Beeb and the different arrangements for shifted characters.

I'm not sure how many backers we would get. If it were for a C64, Amiga or Spectrum (not sure how that would work) there would be no problem. Might be worth asking Tom Williamson (http://www.ident-online.co.uk/computer/) whether he has any interest.

There is so much wonder in the universe; why should you want to imagine that there is more?

What are we actually going to have printed on the key caps? If we do an identical run of the key switches that exactly matches what was on the Beeb, then that would imply making some specialised Beeb keyboard - that in turn would mean spinning a PCB for the keyboard - easily do-able, but it will then get very expensive. If we want to have a set of keycaps that can replace those on a conventional IBM keyboard, then we will have to arrange for tooling to cover the keys that weren't on the Beeb and the different arrangements for shifted characters.

I have a pile of Cherry MX keyswitches sitting next to me, and a plan in my head to make a PCB for them that resembles the Model B or Master keyboard, minus the numpad, plus a prototype of a way to interface a USB keyboard to a Master, which will also work on the Model B when finished. So the PCB is definitely going to happen, costing somewhere in the US$10-20 range per board at least for the prototype run. Cherry MX keyswitches are ~$0.50 each in qty 100, presumably getting cheaper at higher quantities.

Being able to just replace the keycaps on a conventional keyboard would make this way more accessible, but as you say, we'd have to make a bunch more keys, a narrower spacebar, and perhaps versions of the same key for different rows in some cases.

Very curious to hear the pricing details. If the ideal situation isn't affordable, I guess we can just keep using UV-printed keycaps

Ooh, ick. There's an extra row of keys between the alphabetics and the non-printing keys at the right of the BBC Micro's keyboard, isn't there? I was going to suggest re-capping a PC layout keyboard, leaving the unused keys present, but capped in a contrasting colour to show they weren't part of the Beeb's layout. But that won't work. )-8

On the other hand, a custom PCB with a custom arrangement of keyswitches isn't the end of the world. The important thing is to avoid needing a different aperture in the case or different shapes of key cap. I think that's feasible:

...where ✗ denotes an unlabeled key, or one labeled with a non-Acorn function and there are several possible locations for Delete and Copy. Potentially, they could be duplicated in all of them.

That means a slightly narrow Return key, which is a pity but not the end of the world. It also means the cursor keys in a different position, but since they moved between the B and Master anyway, I find it hard to be too upset about that.

I have a premonition that coming up with something that pleases everybody will be quite tricky, though!